I want to thank you for visiting The World According to Mitch. It is because of you that I have been able to achieve the incredible successes I have over the past year.

Since returning from vacation last January I have posted over 250 articles in this space. Granted, some of them (maybe a dozen) were older articles that I had pulled from my archives, but the vast majority of them were new, which means that I wrote (conservatively) two hundred and forty articles in 2012. If writing was all that I did I expect I would still deserve a vacation!

But of course, that is not all I do. I have spent most of 2012 on contract to Microsoft, which has had me traveling some 190 days… Air Canada and Marriott thank me profusely for that.

On Friday January 4th Mrs. Garvis and I are flying to Miami where we are meeting up with some friends. On Saturday the four of us are boarding a cruise ship that will take us out of cell phone range, out of Internet range. We will spend a blessed week cruising the eastern Caribbean with tropical ports of call, fine food, fine drinks, fine cigars, good friends, and hopefully great weather. We will relax, we will tell jokes, and I will not use my computer for anything work related.

That does not mean that I will not be bringing my laptop along with me; unfortunately my primary laptop crashed and burned last week in my car accident, but fortunately I have a few spares, and I will take one of them with me. During the week I will write about whatever suits me – probably a travelogue or two – along the way. It may be about ship-board activity, or I may ponder the meaning of life. If we are to be entirely honest, I would bet on the former over the latter, and it will likely be with a tinge of leftover intoxication.

Do not fear, I have not left you empty handed. I would not want to go dark for a week and see my hits drop like a stone. So in preparation for my absence I have prepared five articles that are scheduled to publish while I am gone. Three will be published first to my other blog, and two are unique to this one. I hope you enjoy them, and have comments and questions waiting for me upon my return!

Yes, this is what I look like in a bathing suit! And yes, she married me anyways!

Friday January 4: Installing NetFx3 on Windows Server 2012

Friday January 4: Microsoft’s 2012 Products: Why can’t they all just work together?

As you can see I have spent a great deal of focus on storage; In November my colleague Pierre and I sat down to plan out our blog topics, and realized that many of you are playing with Hyper-V, but are stuck in a single host because you don’t have a SAN device in your practice lab. We agreed that I would write this series taking you from zero to Failover Cluster in Windows Server 2012. The first article in the series was published in December, and the last three are here. I look forward to hearing everyone’s comments upon my return.

With that I bid you all farewell, not for long, but just long enough. Again, I want to thank you again for making my blog one of the most popular IT blogs on the Internet.